The first Internet was a communications system funded and built by researchers for military use. This Internet, originally known as ARPANET, was embraced by the research and academic world as a mechanism for scientists to share and collaborate with other scientists. This collaborative network quickly evolved into the information superhighway of commerce and communication. The Internet explosion was due, in part, by the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) and Web browsers, which facilitated a more graphically-oriented, multimedia system that uses the infrastructure of the Internet to provide information in a graphical, visual, and interactive manner that appeals to a wider audience of consumers seeking instant gratification.
As the technology underlying transmission bandwidth has grown in conjunction with the accessibility to such increasing transmission bandwidth, a new paradigm for the old idea of Internet collaboration is emerging that takes advantage of the modern graphical, visual world. This new paradigm is also driven by the advance in real-time or time-sensitive data transmission technology, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, and the like. Videoconferencing, which has generally never been able to completely supplant teleconferencing as a viable means for communications, is slowly fading away in favor of Internet-driven technology, such as collaborative electronic meetings. Services, such as WEBEX COMMUNICATIONS, INC.'S, WEBEX™ electronic meeting or collaboration services offer the ability for users to connect, at least initially, across the Internet to share voice, video, and data in real time for meetings, presentations, training, or the like. While the WEBEX™ services are generally initiated over the Internet, once a collaborative meeting or session is established, the communications are transferred to a proprietary network.
Current electronic meeting space applications, including WEBEX™, allow recording of the actual meeting. Thus, audio, slide presentations, shared desktop sessions, chat, and other such information that takes place during the electronic meeting are recorded and may be viewed after the meeting is over. Many such online meeting software applications convert various file formats, such as MACROMEDIA, INC.'s MACROMEDIA FLASH™, MICROSOFT CORPORATION's POWERPOINT™, or the like into a single common format such as Small Web File (SWF) format, which is the native format for MACROMEDIA FLASH™, or WEBEX COMMUNICATION INC.'s UNIVERSAL COMMUNICATION FORMAT™ (UCF), thereby allowing the presentation and integration of different file format types. These applications typically record the playback of the meeting in this single, common format, much like a video camera would record some kind of visual presentation (i.e., the video camera would record a scene comprised of many different items into one movie).
The meeting recording may be edited in such a manner that only certain sections of the meeting are replayed or condensed into a separate file for separate viewing. This ability would allow a meeting or training session covering 10 different consecutive topics to be divided into 10 different recordings, which would allow a more targeted replay of specific content. However, while recorded consecutive sessions may be segmented, all of the data that was presented during that time segment will be displayed to the recording viewers. Therefore, potentially unwanted information within the segment, such as chat messages that occurred during that time segment, would be preserved in the archived presentation. The meeting host or presenter would need to deactivate the unwanted information stream prior to any recording in order to prevent that information from being recorded in the first place.